A two-dimensional pancake of color spread over Djalilian’s chest as Darius fired again: He pulled back on the trigger one more time, and heard grinding again as the Kerikkale jammed. He slammed the weapon into Djalilian’s brow. Djalilian slid aside with his head against his shoulder, his empty jugular offered too late in submission.
The Range Rover was all over the road as the driver, Nasair, unsnapped the shiny holster on his hip. A heavy military revolver came up over the top of the seat, and Darius grabbed the barrel and twisted it away. Nasair brought his other hand from the wheel, and the Range Rover veered toward the curb, throwing Darius into Djalilian’s unconscious embrace.
A shot whizzing past Darius’s ear put a hole in the roof that let in a pinpoint of cool air. The side mirror snapped off as the Range Rover bounced along the line of cars at the curb. He yanked the Browning from Djalilian’s hand and fired through the back of the seat. Nasair exhaled blood while the Range Rover locked bumpers with a blue Volkswagen and danced it in a circle before flinging it into the djoub. Darius scrambled into the front seat and grabbed for the wheel. Nasair’s legs twitched under him, and with the same motion he would have used to punch the cigarette lighter Darius squeezed off another shot and the body spasmed onto the floor.
A streetlight was out over a yard filled with restaurant garbage. Darius backed in, and let the engine run. He pried the military revolver from Nasair’s fist, then stripped the body of cash. After picking Djalilian clean, he rolled out both corpses, and the rear wheels churned a green mound over them like a dog covering a turd. A roundabout route to Mowlavi added five kilometers to a two-kilometer ride, but brought peace of mind that no one was following. When he pulled up at the twin pomegranate trees, the door swung open before he had entered the garden.
“Where were you?” A yawn made a mockery of Maryam’s anger. “When I woke up, and you weren’t anywhere, I—”
“I had to pick up some things,” he said.
“What things? We have food. It’s too dangerous to go out, you said so yourself.”
Darius glanced toward the curb.
“That’s a Komiteh Range Rover.” Maryam retreated involuntarily onto the doorstep. “What’s it doing here?”
“It’s ours now.” He pulled the door shut behind her. “We have to leave.”
She walked through the garden without looking back. One foot was in the passenger’s side when she stepped back out into the gutter again.
“There’s blood all over the seat.”
Darius spread his handkerchief on the wet spot, and she got in. The Range Rover trampled a poplar sapling in his hurry to put distance from the house, and then circled the block headed northeast toward the Old Shemiran Road.
“What’s in here?” Maryam patted the knapsack he had placed between them on the seat.
“Heroin.”
“You found it? Where?”
“Najafi kept his drugs in the quinine and milk sugar he used to cut them with, same as the Afghanis hid the mycotoxins in the heroin. It’s a neat trick, hiding one illicit substance in another. Someone might very well scrape a lead ingot to look for smuggled gold, but who would scrape gold to look for platinum? Sousan must have taught him. The stuff was under my nose at headquarters since the night they were killed.”
Maryam loosened the straps, slipped her hand in.
“Don’t touch that!”
“You don’t have to shout,” she said.
“The mycotoxins are still inside.”
She strapped the bag tight, and put it under her feet, wiped her palm, on the hem of her chador. “What do you need with them now?” Excitement was giving way to resignation that she was taking on a burden that had grown heavier since she’d thought she had put it down for the last time.
Darius turned his head toward her. He stared so hard that she reached for the wheel.
“Well, what? Unless you’re planning to go to war, what good are they?”
“They provide a valuable bargaining chip.”
“For Iran? I still don’t understand.”
“For us,” he said. “For our lives.”
At the Africa-Modaress crossroads several blocks from his apartment they abandoned the Range Rover with the keys in the ignition and took a taxi back downtown. They switched cabs near the old U.S. embassy, giving as their destination an intersection near the Azadi Monument. On a factory street blasted to rubble in the war and never rebuilt Darius asked suddenly to be let out, and they hiked five blocks to the western bus terminal.
“If we move fast, we may be able to reach Azerbaijan Province,” he said, anticipating her questions, “and from there continue into Turkey, or wherever. The roads are heavily patrolled. We’ll be less conspicuous in a bus than in a car until we’re well away from the city.”
“How real are our chances?”
“Better than if we stay. In Teheran we have no chance.”
The 6:00 Iran Peyma Cooperative Number One to Tabriz was the first scheduled departure of the morning. Darius paid for super-luxury-class tickets that would permit them to stretch out their legs and put back their seats. Two hours late, they were called to the gate. As Darius settled beside a man wearing a peasant’s baggy trousers and white cloth slippers with camel bone soles, Maryam found room by a window in the women’s section across the aisle. Another half hour was lost alongside a cinder block shed at the edge of Teheran while Komitehmen came on board for a cursory inspection of the passengers.
It was past 3:00 when they stopped in the Zanjan Province highlands midway to Tabriz, and Darius and Maryam sat together again on the patio of a truckers’ restaurant looking down into the Abhar River gorge.
“I’ve persuaded myself we’re not dead,” Maryam announced to him. “Is there any truth to that rumor?”
“We still have a long way to go. The Komiteh will be looking for us at my apartment and in other places in Teheran. When the Range Rover turns up, the first thing they’ll do is alert all the train stations and bus companies.”
Cold, tiny portions of cello kebab that was the only item on the menu had just been brought out to them when the bus driver came by to say that he would be leaving in ten minutes. Darius dropped his napkin in his plate and got up from the table.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
When the other passengers began lining up for the bus and he had not returned, Maryam walked through the restaurant to a gravel parking area where an outhouse stood away from three or four cars. She called his name, and then knocked on the door, and a little boy jumped out hitching his pants. Everyone else had boarded by the time she came back to the women’s section to wait for him. Soon the driver fixed an unforgiving stare at her, and she tugged her veil across her face and stalked off to the empty table. Were it not for the knapsack that he never would have abandoned, she would have let memory claim him for its own. She dragged the heavy bag to the roadside to watch the bus lumber over the steep grade, and then to survey the bare highway in both directions.
A black Paycon swinging out of the lot stopped beside her with two wheels on the pavement. The passenger door opened, and the knapsack was hauled inside.
“Where were you? How—why did you—”
“Get in.”
The engine sputtered as he came down too heavily on the gas. The light car bucked, and then fishtailed off the gravel.
“I was starting to think you’d left without me,” she said.
“Did you?”
She watched him pat the knapsack, feel it all over. “No, not really.”
“We were trapped on the bus. There are roadblocks everywhere to catch illegals bound for the Zagros Mountains. We’ll attract less attention in a car with Azerbaijan plates. We can stop in Tabriz for food and gas, and go on from there.”
The mountains steepened, the fawn-colored earth ripening to burnt ochre in the high, rocky passes. Altitude wounded the underpowered Paycon. It limped over each summit gasping the thin air, and then roller-coastered into shaded va
lleys while Darius rode the brakes until his nostrils filled with acrid smoke. The road leveled after Mianeh, bypassing tiny villages nearly invisible in mud-brick camouflage. Maryam fell asleep with her head against her arm, and didn’t stir when they stopped for a checkpoint. The volunteers who rose from afternoon prayers carrying their G-3 rifles at port arms looked to Darius to be sixteen or seventeen years old. He kicked the knapsack under the seat, but could not hide it completely.
“Who are you?” the youngest of the Guardsmen demanded in a strong Azerbaijan accent.
“Let us by.” Darius put his hand inside his jacket where his papers should have been, and fit his finger through the trigger guard of Djalilian’s Browning.
“Not just yet. What is your name?”
“Bakhtiar.”
“And who is this woman?”
Maryam squinted at him, shielding her eyes behind her palm while her mind cleared.
“What is your name?”
“Maryam Lajevardi.”
The boy snorted, and stuck his head inside Darius’s window. “What are you doing together on this road?”
Darius eased the gun out of his pocket. The boy was in poor position to defend himself; but with nowhere to run before Tabriz—or after—it would hardly be worth the effort to shoot him.
“We are married,” Maryam said.
“I do not think so. I think you are together for immoral purposes. Let me see your marriage certificate.”
“We don’t take it everywhere we go,” Maryam said. “We know that we are married. It is good enough for us.”
“But not for me. Give me proof of who you are—your marriage license and birth certificate.”
“We have nothing.”
The boy was staring at her, searching for a trace of makeup or speck of color on her nails, loose wisps of hair that were the unquestionable evidence of wantonness. Every time Maryam locked on to his gaze, he averted his eyes.
“If you cannot prove that you are married,” he said, “you will have to come with me.”
“Not that it is any of your business,” Maryam said, “but I am his seegah. He took me as a pleasure bride just last night. There is no marriage certificate, because none is required. We signed a two-week contract, but left it at home. We didn’t know that we would be bothered by impudent children on our honeymoon.”
“I do not believe you.” He had turned away from Maryam, and was speaking to Darius. “Get out of the car.”
“Do you question the holy law of God?” Maryam said.
The boy glared at her, but quickly looked at the ground, avoiding the temptation that resided in every woman’s face.
“How dare you accuse us of immoral behavior when we have submitted ourselves to God’s will? Did the Imam not say that a woman should surrender herself to any pleasure her husband demands, even if she is riding a camel—which is to say when they are on a great journey? If you knew more about God’s law, and less about big guns, you would not have the kind of filthy mind that invents evil where none exists.”
The boy backed around the Paycon, and inspected the license plate officiously. “Let me see your car registration.”
Darius riffled through the papers inside the glove box. There was no registration or title, just a few torn maps and old repair bills. He heard the squeal of air brakes, and looked back at the Tabriz bus pulling up to the shed.
The door opened for a boy who might have been this one’s twin. He boarded ahead of the other Guardsmen, and stepped off first in custody of a couple trying not to look at each other, the man silver-haired and wearing a crisp blue suit, and a woman close to thirty in a long Shahsavan skirt. He brought their identification to an older Guardsman, who examined the papers and then went inside the shed. The couple, making inadvertent eye contact, began to weep.
“Your papers?” Darius was asked.
He again riffled inside the glove compartment, and came out with a receipt for recapped tires and two gallons of antifreeze. A blue stamp over a column of numbers read, PAID. Darius handed it to the boy, who started toward the shed, but then returned to the Paycon as the older Guardsman came back outside with a whip coiled around his shoulder.
“What is the problem now?” Darius said angrily. “This pass was issued in Teheran by Ayatollah Golabi authorizing our travel through Azerbaijan Province without having to be bothered.”
“I have never heard of such a document.”
“Don’t take my word for it,” Darius said. “See for yourself.”
The boy stared at the page as though it were a religious manuscript. He pinched a corner between his fingers, then gave it back to Darius, who refolded it carefully before returning it to the glove compartment.
“Okay, you can pass.”
Darius let go of the Browning. As he steered through the roadblock, he looked back once. The man in the blue suit had taken off his jacket, and lay on his stomach across a low table. When the older Guardsman raised the whip high overhead, the Shahsavan woman fainted.
“How did you know he’d let us go?” Maryam asked.
“He’s illiterate,” Darius said, “at least in Farsi, and probably in his own language, but would have lost too much face in admitting that to us. You handled him well.”
“There were plenty of little prigs like him in Lebanon,” she said. “For him a woman is strictly an instrument of pleasure, otherwise best to be avoided. The only thing he fears worse than a woman is that he’ll miss out on paradise, and the women who will be his slaves there.”
“Why did you say you were my seegah?” His tone had chilled, assuming a policeman’s formal inquisitiveness.
“Have you been defamed? Is it inconceivable for such a thing to happen?”
“You should have told him we were married. It’s more believable.”
“Any dumb kid can see I’m not your permanent wife. Your attitude toward… toward things in general, I doubt it’s much different from his.”
Darius rejected the notion with a burst of speed. “I know there’s no paradise,” he said.
18
PASSING THROUGH THE GATE of the Builders, the last sight of Tabriz was a train station of white stone and a Chaldean church crowned with a blunted cross. A blue blaze parallel to the highway came into focus as the landing strip of a regional airport. Widening circles of light scrubbed the night from the tarmac, and Darius slowed to watch three helicopters, old American Hueys, drop out of the void discharging men in khaki into the sandstorm they had brought with them.
Maryam, who had curled up on the seat with her legs under her, turned her back against the flying dust. “What is it?”
“So many refugees are trying the mountains,” he said, “the Revolutionary Guards must be moving reinforcements to the border regions.”
Her eyes were shutting again as she stretched to the ceiling. “Oh … ?”
Darius opened his window, and Maryam’s loose hair whipped his cheek, the current from that sporadic contact all that was keeping him alert. Then her head lolled against his shoulder, and he tried to imagine what it would be like if she were his seegah, and this the first night of a two-week pleasure marriage. A preposterous idea—except that already he was lost in it. Feelings of embarrassment were complicated by a curious detachment, as though peeping through a window he had caught himself in an unsavory act and didn’t know which one of him should feel the greater shame. Had Maryam never been a Bride of Blood, and not transferred her zealotry to causes still to be invented, there might have been more between them than his medieval fantasy. The reality of the situation was that he was delivering goods to an unknown destination, and she had gone along for the ride.
He reached for a sack of fruit Maryam had bought in Tabriz, and gorged on dried figs to stay awake. Low-flying aircraft were somewhere overhead. With his face close to the windshield he craned toward the Hueys he had seen on the ground as they swarmed in the direction of the border. The next major town was Marand, a place he knew nothing about other than that i
t would be heavily patrolled by troops from a nearby military installation. More inviting was a dot on the map called Sufian, from which secondary roads wandered around Lake Urmiya to Turkey, two hundred kilometers to the west.
Hunting for the Sufian turnoff, he saw red lights strung across the highway on a wood semaphore. Men in Guardsmen’s khaki came out of a floodlit shack to wait for the Paycon alongside the barricade. As he moved his hand toward Maryam’s shoulder, her eyes opened and settled on the lights.
“Better get up.”
“Huh? I wasn’t—” She yawned, and would have smiled had the significance of the lights not begun to register: Turning her face to the breeze, she drank in cool air, then pulled the chador over her forehead and felt for stray wisps of hair. “Leave everything to me.”
The red lights suddenly swept upward. Darius fed more gas, but slammed the brakes when the semaphore came down again after releasing a Bedford truck into the lane. The Paycon swerved around the truck, and continued to the barricade, where the Guardsmen shined electric lanterns into the front seat. Shielding his eyes from the glare, Darius did not see the man who asked him, “What are you doing on this road at such an hour of the night?”
“We are going to Maku.”
“The border area is restricted to commercial traffic. What is your business there?”
“I am employed by a customs brokerage in Teheran. I have been sent to pick up a consignment of precious gemstones that are locked up in the customs warehouse.”
“Have you proof of who you work for?”
“They know my name in Maku.”
“Let me see your passport.”
Darius’s hand brushed the pocket where he kept his French ID. “We didn’t bring passports,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Of what use would they be when we are going only as far as the border?”
The light moved away from his face, and he squinted at a handsome man of about thirty whose green eyes had the Mongol cast of a native Azerbaijani, and whose lips formed an unkind smile. Why was he being given a hard time about passports? Why didn’t they ask about Maryam, a grilling for which he had come well rehearsed? He looked into the sky as one of the giant Hueys floated over the checkpoint and then descended into an oat field behind the shed. The Guardsman shut his eyes, and turned his back on the whirlwind while Darius sized up his chances of crashing through the checkpoint. Since leaving Teheran he had anticipated having to make a decision like this, but wanted more than a dust cloud to cover his escape.
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